Silent Mind Golf brings a refreshingly simple yet original approach to mental aspects of golf. It is written by a business professional and lifelong golfer, Robin Sieger, who directly relates to "the average golfer's love-hate relationship with the game". The book guides golfers of all skill levels to "get out of their own way" and learn to play intuitively and instinctively. This is also the first golf book to be accompanied by a mental conditioning audio CD that teaches the learner the 'how to'.

"Improving mental excellence takes practice, just like improving your swing to be more consistent," says Sieger. "It came to me several years ago that I could apply the theories of best performance, those I'd traditionally used in a business context, to my golf. Almost immediately I reduced my handicap from 16 to 8."

We cannot guarantee that this exclusive series of extracts from the book will halve your handicap, but we are certain it will help to give you valuable direction in what is the most over-looked aspect of the game.

On the golf course and often before
a match itself we can often experience
nervousness. This emotion
can (and will) manifest itself in a
number of different ways, but the
most common are sweating, ‘butterflies’ in the
tummy and in extreme cases shaking. Why is this?
What causes us to feel this way and how can we deal
with the emotion?

The symptoms of the nervous tension we are experiencing
are caused by adrenaline being released into
our bloodstream, which causes the ‘fight or flight’ response.
It is an evolutionary inbuilt survival mechanism.
When our Neanderthal relatives were hunting
20,000 years ago, the sight of a woolly mammoth
lumbering toward them would immediately result in
an injection of adrenaline that would give their body
the best chance of survival (by increasing heart rate,
concentrating the blood flow into the core organs for
speed and strength). The great woolly mammoth may
no longer be a threat to human survival but the fight
or flight response to stress remains, and this is what
causes our mouths to dry, sweat ducts to open up,
heart to race and stomach to feel queasy.

Which is no state to play good golf.

The reason we still experience this reaction under
pressure, I believe, is that we get ahead of ourselves.
We think about the negative consequences of a future
outcome, and immediately start worrying about it. Let
me give you an example. A nervous airline passenger
is told they have to fly in six days to attend a business
meeting. The person begins to think about the things
that can go wrong on the flight: the plane may crash,
or be hijacked, they may suffer claustrophobia, or get
food poisoning, or may accidentally get sucked into
the engine. (Yes, I have heard that one before!) So, by
focusing on the possible negative outcomes of the
plane trip, they create in their minds a very powerful
(and very real to them) mental image of exactly the
thing they fear: flying. As a consequence the body responds
and they experience nervousness and anxiety.

What does all this have to do with golf? I mean,
generally no one expects to die on the golf course as
the result of a shot. It just isn’t that serious a deal.
And yet we are all only too well aware of the implications
of these emotions and their negative effect on
performance. So how do you deal with it?

Well, through years of research studying top
golfers and other high achievers, I discovered a common denominator: successful athletes and
businessmen master to a better degree
than others the ability to be ‘in the moment’
– another term for this is mindfulness.

In the Silent Mind approach to golf, we
need to be in a state of mindfulness in
which there is no thought at all. I call this
presence. We become totally ‘in the moment’,
a state where we have no thoughts
of the past or future, and, most importantly,
no thought in the present moment
(which is simply the duration of the
swing).

I’ve heard of professional golfers who
are asked about the greatest round they
ever played. Many tell of a stunning round
of near-perfect golf during which they
were, so they say, ‘in the ‘zone’. When
asked years later what they felt about that
round, they remember it as being their
best ever, but when asked how they felt at the time, they
reply ‘Nothing’.

Rather than find this odd, I find this wholly consistent
with the state of perfect mindfulness – when we no
longer associate any emotion to the act of doing, or the
outcome of the action. We exist in the moment, which
explains why people in this state (psychologists explain
it as ‘optimal flow’) feel ‘timeless’ with “a strong sense of
certainty towards achieving desired results.

The Chatterbox Mind

Clearly, the more we are aware of the conditions required
to bring about such a state, the more likely we are
to make it occur and reap the benefits in terms of our
performance. I believe that as we stand over the shot,
the ability to think of nothing at all is the single greatest
mental key to peak performance.

Curiously most of us experience this every day. When
you drive a car you simply get in with the knowledge of
where you want to go...and then you go there. You don’t
think about the position of your feet, your hands, or the
route you are going to take. You just jump in the car and
drive to your destination without any clear memory of
the journey. Yet (and here is the truly disturbing part) as
statistical analysis will clearly prove, every time you get
in a car you run the risk you may be killed. But we never
think of that.

With the exception of nervous drivers, the majority of
us jump into our car and drive without sense of fear or
dark, foreboding thoughts. In the game of golf, I want
you to go about each shot in exactly the same way you
would drive your car or walk down the street – i.e. with
no thought at all – just an understanding and awareness
of where you want the ball to finish.

Of course, as golfers we are all too aware of the barriers
to this. When we arrive at the golf course to play an
important match, more often than not we get ahead of
ourselves, and worry about bad shots, losing the match,
how we are going to tackle to tough drive at the 8th hole
(when we are walking down the 2nd!), and so on. In so
doing we are no longer ‘in the present’, we are now getting
nervous about a future outcome we fear. We are the
victim of what I call the ‘chatterbox mind’. We have to
learn to control the chatterbox mind.

Though this can sound a somewhat too analytical a
view of what many would consider a natural part of the
game, I have no doubt that anything you have learnt you
can unlearn, so just as easily as you intuitively allow
yourself to think of the future (generally in a negative
way) so too can you train yourself to ‘be in the moment’,
and think of nothing at all. But learning to still your
mind and be in the present takes time and daily practice.
You learn to still your mind with repeated practice.

Some people find it much easier than others. Some spend
a great deal of time learning to still their mind. The good
news is that everyone can do it. However, like anything in
life that needs to be learned, it takes repetition, dedication
and diligent practice. It is ironic that to learn how
‘not to think’ might sound like a paradox, it is unlikely
you will get it right the first time. When we first try to sit
in silence and think of nothing, thoughts will pop into
our heads. Usually these random ideas and images will
just appear in our conscious minds. Through repeated
practice we learn not only how to still the mind at will,
but also, when these random thoughts do appear, how
not to pay them any attention or focus on them at all.

Thinking of nothing

I would like you to put down this magazine and sit upright
in a comfortable position for 10 minutes with your
eyes closed. I want you to think about nothing at all Absolutely
nothing. I imagine, right now, you think this
will be the easiest thing in the world to do. Some of you
may think it is an opportunity to have a quick snooze,
but this is not about going to sleep, this is about emptying
your mind of thought. Ten minutes, eyes closed,
without sleeping or thinking of anything.

What happened? I imagine for the first 10 or 15 seconds
you may have been able to think of nothing and then,
slowly but surely, random thoughts popped into your
head. Maybe you were just aware of your seat or felt very
self-conscious that you were trying to think of nothing.

Time slowed down, and when you
opened your eyes (after what you
imagined was 10 minutes), you discovered
that maybe only four minutes
or less had lapsed.

There is good reason why it is hard to
think of nothing: not thinking is an
alien concept. The brain doesn’t
switch off – even when we are asleep
it generates dreams. And yet stilling
the mind and emptying our brain is
the key to releasing our true potential
in golf, silencing the ‘chatterbox
mind’ and allowing what we have
learned to flow.

When you’re walking down the
street, you’re not thinking about
walking. When you start a journey,
you actively know where you’re going,
and without thinking you walk or drive in that direction
of your destination.

In the game of golf, we need to swing the club in the
same way we walk along the road, with no thought at all,
just an awareness of where we want the ball to finish.

Stilling the mind

We do not still the mind simply by telling it to ‘be quiet’.
The very act of telling ourselves to think of nothing requires
thought. Rather, we learn to still the mind
through practising ‘silent meditation’, and creating a trigger
word that we associate with this stillness.

Using the Silent Mind techniques of focus, faith and
presence, it is only in the final stage, presence, that we
actually enter the Silent Mind state, where no thoughts
exists, just being and doing.

(For those of you wishing to explore this further, my
book comes with a guided meditation CD that explains
this process in more detail.)

In the high-stakes arena of major golfing events, this
ability to empty or ‘still’ the mind is tested to its limits,
and the players who are best able to play one shot at a
time, keeping their focus in the present, are most likely
to give themselves the best chance to win. In short, the
chances of them choking are reduced, because they are
not being anxious about the future. Less thinking and
more going with the natural flow.

Justin Rose’s phenomenal performance at Muirfield
Village in the Memorial Tournament recently struck me
as one of the greatest closing rounds of golf I have seen
in a long time by a player who was, evidently, ‘in the
zone’ all day long. He didn’t miss a shot and seemed to
get better as the round went on – none other than Jack
Nicklaus himself greeted Justin as he left the 72nd green
and told him simply: “You’re swing was perfect.”
Justin has always had the talent; here it was allowed to
flow (without interference) from his body – the only
thoughts in his mind would have been on precisely
where he wanted the ball to go.

Looking back through history, one of my favourite examples
of this perfect mental state manifesting itself on
the course involved none other than Bobby Jones during
a playoff for the 1923 US
Open Championship.

After seven years of high
expectations from the boy
wonder, Jones had yet to win
a major, and here he found
himself in a playoff with Scottish
professional Bobby
Cruickshank. After an epic
battle the players were tied
after 17 holes. The 18th hole
at Inwood is a dramatic finishing
hole. It is a long par-four
guarded by a lagoon. To have
any chance of reaching the
green in two, players have to
hit a long drive. For once
Cruickshank’s drive was poor.

He hit a low hook that travelled
about 150 yards and meant that he could not possibly
reach the green in two. Jones played his customary
fade, a long shot that landed just off the right side of the
fairway but his ball was on a patch of dry hard ground
surrounded by dirt. He had 200 yards to the green over
the lagoon. Cruickshank had no option but to lay up and
he played his second shot to leave himself an easy pitch
to the flag.

All of the contemporary accounts of the day say that
Jones didn’t waste any time over his second shot. He
pulled his driving iron out of the bag. (The driving iron is
the equivalent of a 2-iron, a club which is notoriously difficult
to get right.)

Jones’ father, his friend and journalist, OB Keeler and
his teacher, Stewart Maiden, could hardly bear to watch.
All three men said afterwards that they had never seen
Jones play a ball with such deliberation and so decisively.
The ball cleared the water, bounced twice on the green,
nearly hit the pin and came to rest six feet past the flag.

Jones himself said that he had no memory of the shot
itself. He says that he remembers looking up and seeing
the ball on the green and wondering how it had got there.
For me this is the single most revealing event in Bobby
Jones’ golfing career. He faced a difficult shot under intense
pressure and he executed the shot to perfection yet he had
no memory of the decision making process he went
through before making the shot. He was what we would describe
now as being “in the zone” and on auto pilot.

This for him would have the feeling of time standing
still as he instinctively made the right decisions, dismissed
any element of worry from his mind and concentrated totally
on the task in hand as action and awareness combined
and his subconscious mind took over. The fact that
Jones had no recollection of the shot is what convinces me
that he was at that point ‘in the moment’.

We may not have Jones technical skill and timing in the
swing, but the mental game is accessible to all. But remember
– it requires regular daily practice of the practice of
being present in the moment.

Reproduced with kind permission of Golf International Magazine

World Ranking: McIlroy jumps back into the World top 10 & Tournaments Roundup